(It'll get done.)

mood lighting

If you are anything like me, you have a house with vaulted ceilings and a kitchen with cupboard DEAD SPACE. This is that area above your cupboards that you always wished you could do something with. Most people toss a silk ivy plant or two up there to just break the monotony of emptiness. Others do things like… fill it with a million penguin figurine/stuffed animals… but please, let me highly discourage you from that for many obvious reasons.

When you first climb up there, oooeeee. You can see where I took a wipe up there and what was left. This is one greasy project, and one for a heavy duty decreasing cleaner. My favorite is Simple Green® and it does a great job, safely. If you had not been up there before and your home was not cleaned from top to bottom recently, you will see exactly what cooking does. The greases from butter, oils, and smoke rise with the heat and settle all over the ceiling, walls, cupboards including the top of your cupboards. That gunk can gather dust as well as dead bugs and SKIN! All this can, over time, rain down onto your food. Yuck!

But I do have some tips for managing that grime!

1. Clean The Grease. Even standing on my counters, my cupboards are very tall. Everything is hard to reach because I’m not very tall, myself. So I grabbed my handy-dandy extension pole and attached it to my mophead. I sprayed some degreaser on the walls and on top of the cupboards as well as dunked the mophead in a solution and went to town.

2. Give It a Silver Lining. The best way to manage the upper grease on the cupboards and prevent it from settling is to line it with aluminum foil. You could use wax paper, but I prefer foil and I’m about to show you why!

3. Admire Your New Light. Now you can see what the foil is doing. It is actually filling those dark corners above the cupboards reflecting the kitchen light onto them. Not only that, but when you do your next deep cleaning all you have to do is replace the greasy linty foil with new foil. The foil is also going to protect the cupboards from what we are going to do next.

4. Add Mood Lighting. Purchase some mini Christmas lights (I got some from Lowe’s for $2.50) and put them up on top of the foil, dropping the plug down inbetween the cupboards. The foil will protect the cupboards, and LED lights will be cooler and cheaper, however the lighting will not be as warm. There are special rope lights you can purchase which is great for this too (mine burned out so I used what I had). I also put a stuffed coffee bag in the corner as a start for my rustic coffee house feel, which I will update you on next! Stay tuned.